The Avintes factory of Hydro, a company in the aluminum sector, produced its first batch of recycled aluminum “practically zero in polluting emissions”. In production, Hydro used post-consumer scrap as its raw material, recovered from products at the end of their useful life, which can be considered carbon neutral when reused through recycling.
Aluminum is one of the most used metals in the world, with applications in various sectors such as the automobile industry, civil construction, transport, energy or electronics. The process of recycling raw materials at the end of their useful life allows them to be reused countless times, without losing their properties and consuming only 5% of the energy used to produce primary aluminum.
In the words of João Nina, responsible for the recycling unit at Hydro Avintes, “this is the first batch of Hydro Recycled Low Carbon produced at Hydro Avintes with 100% post-consumer scrap, without the addition of process scrap (pre-consumer) or primary aluminum. Therefore, we can consider that its carbon footprint is almost zero, less than 0.5 kg CO2e/kg Al”.
The official added that “in aluminum recycling, we can consider pre-consumer scrap, which we generate in our own extrusion process and which did not become part of a final product, and post-consumer scrap, which can be part of a used window, car or bicycle, recovered to be converted back into raw material for profile extrusion. At Hydro, we believe that we cannot separate the footprint from the material, that is, pre-consumer scrap should not be considered decarbonized, but it still contributes its own ecological footprint to the recycling process.”
On the other hand, Rui Abreu, Metal Director at Hydro Extrusion South, highlighted that “this is a milestone in our effort to offer more sustainable aluminum solutions with a lower carbon footprint, which in turn will improve the environmental impact of our customers’ products.”
This is another step in the company’s sustainability strategy, which adds to others, such as the one achieved in 2023, at its Irurtzun factory in Navarra (Spain), where, for the first time in the world, green hydrogen was used to produce aluminum recycled.
